2010.12.02

There was a time, when we were writing and photographing only for this site and not for a living, when our travels were all about marketing. Not the sort of marketing that requires credit cards and ends with stuffed shopping bags and a big dent in your bank account, but the kind you do if food is one of the first things you think about in the morning and among your last thoughts before bed before bed. The kind of marketing that sees you cruising crowded aisles while ogling fresh produce; trading smiles, hand gestures, and shrugs with vendors who don't speak your language any better than you speak theirs; stepping daintily between puddles in dimly lit, cavernous structures; holding your breath as you transit areas thick with the smell of caged fowl; and dodging pushcarts heaped with melons or bags of ice or pig carcasses.

Yep, Dave and I are market hounds -- connoisseurs, even. "Market before sights" is our motto; quite often sights don't figure at all into our travels around Asia and beyond. Click the 'Markets' category on our sidebar and you'll find market photos and ruminations from Mindanao to northern Sumatra. We've got a stack of notebooks and a store of photos focused purely on markets that would fill a small filing cabinet.

But this changed when we started traveling for work. Sure, we always make time to hit a market no matter where we are, but rarely anymore do we have time to do markets justice, to really dig into them the way we used to. To spend hours a day, days in a row, becoming a temporary regular. Names of produce and dried goods duly recorded, recipes eeked from busy vendors and chatty shoppers, connections made over a number of visits that enable Dave to get close with the camera.

What a refreshing change it was then, to find ourselves in Luang Namtha with no work and some time on our hands. We'd just wrapped up a couple weeks of work in Luang Prabang. We hadn't enough energy for a trek (perhaps next visit -- Luang Namtha is northern Laos' premier eco-tourism destination), but we did have a few days to ourselves in a beautiful place, with no internet and no obligations.

Of course, we reverted to our old ways. We hit the markets.

Our favorite by far was the morning market in Luang Namtha town. It's not a huge market, not a packed and heaving market. But it's a just-right kind of market. Small enough to cover thoroughly in a couple of hours, lively enough to draw us back several mornings in a row.

and rolling thick rice flour sheets speckled with bits of chopped scallion greens around pork. These rolls are then shallow-fried for a northern Lao-style spring roll, to be dipped in dark soy sauce seasoned with chopped fresh chilies.

This same vendor also makes a sort of filled dumpling by pouring rice flour batter into shallow ladles, adding a bit of pork, and then covering the pork with more batter before immersing the entire thing in hot oil. It must be said that these treats are incredibly greasy -- but absolutely delicious.

In between the meat sellers and the food makers are ladies (because in Laos women rule about 98% of the market) selling fresh herbs and leafy greens, dried fish and sakan (a woody stem that imparts peppery-ness to local stews and soups), mushrooms and banana flowers and pea greens, buffalo skin and mak tua nao (fermented and sun-dried soybean discs) tied in stacks, and goods imported from China: the ubiquitous oily chili-and-black-bean condiment called Lao Gan Ma (addictive, if you're into chilies) dried prickly ash (aka Sichuan peppercorn), ginseng, and dried sweet potato noodles. Among other things.

Our favorite part of Luang Namtha's morning market exists for just a few hours each day. Each morning before dawn women and a few men converge on the patch of concrete in front of the market building. Plastic tarps are rolled out, newspapers and squares of cardboard unfolded and laid on the ground, bicycle-pulled carts parked and turned into display counters.

Braziers are fired up, for making sweet puffed cotton candy-like cassava crisps. Sellers squat behind their patch of concrete, arranging vegetables cultivated and foraged, small local river fish and the occasional batch of squid or prawns imported from Thailand,

wild birds, and the odd forest creature. The most plentiful items are mint, green onions (white portion sold separately from the green, which is generally eaten raw), watercress, yellow flowering mustard,

and bamboo.

There are other, less familiar vegetables -- including rice paddy herb

and clover, which we saw being harvested at the edge of dry rice paddies and alongside roads. Vendors told us it's eaten in soup.

An unusual find: puckeringly sour 'seeds', which the vendor called 'som pot' and said would be used to make 'mak som pot' -- dried, flattened discs of sourness to be used to flavor dishes?

And a favorite one: tart and spicy pickle of mustard leaves and chilies, sold with a frresh slivered scallion (the white part here) and feathery dill fronds. We are dedicated Pickle Lovers, and this preparation is one of the best we've encountered in southeast Asia. Dave and I took to purchasing a big bag every morning to add to and eat with our Lao kao soi and fer.

The corner of this evanescent section of the market belongs to rattan sellers, Akha women who trek to Luang Namtha from villages in the surrounding hills. You'd know them by their beautiful headwear

and the wooden yokes, attached to burnished rattan baskets, balanced on their shoulders.

Rattan -- yes, the same rattan used to make baskets and other furnishings -- as foodstuff was the most curious culinary discovery of our time in Luang Namtha.

It is the younger part of the rattan that's harvested for food. The sticks, which are covered with long thorns, are charred over an open flame and then stripped of their 'skin' with a sharp knife.

The inner core is boiled and its softened flesh pounded with shallots, garlic, cilantro, and various other ingredients and eaten as a dip, or added to soups and stews. (Note: you may be able to find bottled rattan shoots in Thai groceries.)

By 7:30am the crowd in front of the market is beginning to thin out. Arrive at 9am and you'll never know it was there.

Yet we ate well during our visit to this remote province in northern Laos late last March. This was thanks in part to the restaurant at The Boat Landing, a laid-back riverside 'resort' (I hesitate to use that word lest it conjure images of the sort of luxe, isolated-from-the-real-world lodgings more easily found on true beaches elsewhere in the region) about 30 minutes by bicycle from Luang Namtha town.

The Boat Landing's little kitchen prepares specialties of Luang Namtha's numerous ethnic groups. Each night we dined on a variety of jaew (dips) made with unusual ingredients such as young rattan tips (creamy and a bit nutty, like sesame paste), sawtooth herb, and a local variety of Sichuan peppercorn (prickly ash, actually); soupy stews called aw lahm, packed with eggplant and snake beans and foraged leafy vegetables; toasted mak tua nao, umami-rich discs of pressed and dried fermented soybeans seasoned with chilies; and sticky rice. (Coming soon: my review of a cookbook inspired by this very kitchen and featuring recipes from around Luang Namtha.)

During the day we hit the streets, foraging as best we could -- up and out before dawn, biking first to a nearby market where we might snack a bit, and then further on into Luang Namtha town, for its relatively larger morning market. There we found a warming and delicious northern Laos-style kao soi, a good green papaya salad, some wonderful pickles, and a few other treats we'll tell you about later in the week.

In town we also discovered a restaurant -- admittedly grotty, though we never fell ill from eating there -- serving intriguing Chinese-Laotian dishes.

Cycling back to the Boat Landing mid-afternoon, we sometimes found a food stall or two open in the tiny village of lovely wooden structures up the road from The Boat Landing. Once we stopped for what was possibly the best tam mak hoong (green papaya salad) of our trip, pungently fishy with padek and made with wide flat strips of crispy papaya.

On another day a woman sitting behind a low table set next to the entrance of a shop house caught our eye. Before her was a tall container of clear liquid with a few red orbs bobbing in it, a jar of chili paste and another of MSG (a common table condiment in Laos), and a large enameled metal bowl draped with a cloth. Hung from a nail protruding from the wooded door frame were small bags of golden fried rice crackers.

We lowered ourselves onto stools so low we might as well have been sitting on our heels, and watched as she pulled bricks of rice flour jelly from beneath the cloth. She sliced each into cubes and dropped them into small ceramic bowls.

To this she added a ladle or two of liquid and a few of the red orbs, which turned out to be cherry tomatoes. A small scoop of chili paste went on top. Finally she pulled a package of rice crackers from the hook, slit it open with her knife, and motioned for us to break the crisps over our bowls.

The liquid was sour, probably from the tomatoes but also, I think, with vinegar. Combined with the cool and bland soft jelly it made for a dish to revive us after a long, unshaded bike ride at the height of a bright-white hot-season afternoon.

We're suckers for anything hot and sour, so the fiery cilantro-seasoned and slightly fishy chili sauce made the already pleasant treat even better. And the deep-fried crackers, which retained their crunch despite immersion in the liquid, contrasted nicely with the squishy jelly.

The next morning we spied the same dish at the Luang Namtha morning market, and found a woman making and steaming the rice jelly in its rear 'kitchen'.

2010.11.17

Prompted by a review -- of a new book on the cuisine of northern Laos -- that I recently finished writing for ZesterDaily (I'll link it here when it's published, probably within a week), Dave has been sorting through some photos from our excursion last March north from Luang Prabang, where we were working on a few stories for Wall Street Journal Asia, north to Luang Namtha.

Luang Namtha is a weird, complicated, fascinating place that is undergoing rapid change. We haven't posted nearly enough on our days there -- something we plan to remedy shortly.

In the meantime, here's a time-lapse of the making of an interesting snack sold at Luang Namtha's morning market: a cracker (for lack of a better word) made from ground rice cassava flour. Held over hot coals, the initial cracker 'pancake' puffs to several times its original size.

What grabbed us most about this treat -- other than the dexterity that the vendor displays as she turns it back and forth above the cooking fire - was its texture, something akin to cotton candy. 'Light as air' would be an apt description; it dissolves almost immediately on contact with lips and tongue, leaving just a hint of sweetness.

It's also, as the time-lapse shows, a popular pre-school snack for kids lucky enough to pass by the market on their way to class.